All over Twitter this AM were posts about 'Watson'. I glanced at the titles and figured Watson was some CEO of a huge company that I didn't know. Then I looked at Mashable and saw that Watson is actually a supercomputer. What?! The first line of the article was "Humanity took a beating from the machines this week." Whoa. The big news was that the Supercomputer Watson had beat the best Jeopardy players in Jeopardy's history. Only a few years ago, Watson couldn't even get 20% of the answers right. That is a steep learning curve.
So, it is impressive that the supercomputer beat the humans but that wasn't what grabbed me. It was the fact that the developer/research, John Prager, announced they were now going to take Watson into the health care arena to diagnose peoples symptoms. Something about that idea unnerves me a bit. I see technology as a tool for humans to use but now the tool is using the humans. It seems like a bit of a leap to go from entertainment straight to medicine and I will definitely want to learn more before I make an appt with Dr. Watson.
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NYT Connections Sports Edition today: Hints and answers for December 21
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1 comment:
I don't necessarily see this as such a bad thing though. Humans are prone to error. If the software is right and works along side humans in case of glitches, then there could be much less misdiagnoses, more early diagnoses and way fewer malpractice claims. Though it is scary to think how computer are being to more and more replace us, I 'm personally glad that at least they are using Watson for good instead of evil
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